Before AT1 had ground down the slipway unchristened―rightly, said seamen, for it would be a ship with no soul―it had been dubbed “Zombie.” That sinister name would stick, and prove its accuracy. AT1 was a robot-ship, a ship with no crew, only a tiny security force of 3 men and a woman. “Invulnerable,” said its inventors, and “foolproof.”

But it was neither―not if one of the 4 security guards was an insane, ruthless killer. And if the greatest and most powerful self-contained nuclear reactor in the world fell into the hands of such a person, the whole world was in peril!

The year 1953 is a hallowed one to such connoisseurs of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Brian W. Aldiss, Judith Merril and Damon Knight. It was in that year that a novel called THE ROSE appeared in the British magazine, Authentic SF. It was only the second novel by the American Charles Harness, but he was already a highly regarded writer by those in the know. It was also, unfortunately, his last, until his recent resumption of writing and the publication of a long-awaited new novel, THE RING OF RITORNEL. (Available as a Berkley paperback, X1630)

THE ROSE depicts an ultimate confrontation between science and art, brilliantly and wittily played out between three unforgettable leading characters:

Anna van Tuyl—a composer and also a practicing psychiatrist
Ruy Jacques—Anna’s lover
Martha—Ruy’s wife, who is perfecting a deadly weapon that will render science supreme over art

Here, at last, is a U.S. edition of this superb SF novel, an exciting event for all admirers of little-known science fiction gems.

Magellan is the last city-state on earth—a society where perfection is being rapidly approached. It is the Eve of Eternity—the day when the great computer complex Chronophage will assume dominion over the earth and grant every man his wish.

Euripides Che Fourthojuly 1070121, who has been avoiding the tranquilizing drugs all are required to take, will be in for a very bad time indeed….

It was so powerful that in one instant it obliterated an entire building. Only the concrete floor and stumps of walls, like the evacuated ruins of some ancient city, gave any indication that there had been a building there at all.

The Quy Effect

Its implications were so revolutionary as to render all past scientific concepts obsolete…which only served to alienate the entire scientific community against its inventor, Adolphe Quy….

—that’s what the people of Lost Haven called the six children (seven, if you counted Bad John) of the Dulanty Family. They looked like normal Earth children…except when they flicked their ears like animals, or made their eyes glow with a green fire…and if you looked at them sideways they did look strangely like nightmarish gargoyles.

The truth is: these children are Pucas, aliens from a strange planet. And they have taken it upon themselves to reduce the world to a population of six (seven, if you count Bad John). Wishing will make it so, for by making up an appropriate death rhyme, they can destroy their victims.

These frightening, far-out kids take a black delight in destroying their neighbors, and the Earth people are defenseless against them….

A scientist reports to a stunned world: “The whole earth may be shrivelling up like a punctured balloon.” The flight from cities at high altitudes—whose nitrogen gas accidentally released from the earth’s core is gathering to cause mass death—to the coastlines creates political chaos and violent anarchy. But worse is in store for mankind—for the coastline holds only temporary haven.

The great oceans of the world are about to deliver destruction on a scale never before envisioned even in nightmares of nuclear holocaust. Two men and two women in a flimsy yacht in the Pacific may hold the key to the earth’s survival…

High above the heavy air, the March People and the winged Drak met where the two suns crossed: locked in a battle as old as the ritual of life itself. For Amarson and his fierce lady Ameera, to live was to kill Drak; to die was nothing. That was the Law—until the long-winged Flier came, riding the crest of the thermocline….

In this masterful science fantasy adventure, S. Kye Boult has created a world that is both grippingly intense and luminously strange.

When Sibyl Sue Blue, unique police sergeant of the future, smokes a benzale cigarette, she has a strange dream about the disappearance of her husband on the mysterious planet of Radix.

So she pulls of [sic] her wig and rouges her knees, and goes off to Radix with sinister millionaire Stuart Grant, and crew, in his space ship.

She finds her husband there, horribly transformed, and is in great danger of the same fate herself, unless she can get back to Earth in time. But this presents difficulties, because only Sibyl and the loathsome Dr. Beadle are in any shape to fly the ship, and neither one of them has ever done it before….

The Uncensored Man by Arthur SellingsBerkley Medallion Books, 1967 (Originally published in 1964)Price I paid: 90¢

Dr. Mark Anders was one of the government’s top physicists, working on a high priority project concerning defense. Wrapped up in his abstract world of mathematical symbols, he was ill-prepared for the messages he began to receive. They were in words of other languages…and they came from strange sources: the babblings of an epileptic in a fit; the output sheet of a new super computer on a test run.

But this was only the beginning, for he was soon to find himself transported to a different dimension, setting foot on another world, whose people had been desperately trying to contact him in order to deliver a message terrifying in its implications for the future of the human race…